Robert STANTON: [Y]ou once said something...about your first sexual experience. Do you recall it?Gore VIDAL: Yes, I was asked if my first sexual experience was homosexual of heterosexual. I said I was too polite to ask.- Ibid.; referencing a televised interview with David Frost; also quoted in the Sunday Times Magazine, September 16, 1973

These books are a great deal harder to read than they were to write.- on Sufi spiritualist writer Idries Shah